The largest investment of the forest industry in Finland – the new Kemi bioproduct mill and the paperboard mill expansion – came into operation as planned on Wednesday 20 September 2023. The operations will start department by department. Pulp deliveries from the new mill to customers will begin in October 2023. “Metsä Group’s products replace fossil materials in people’s daily lives. Pulp and paperboard are used as raw materials for numerous consumer goods, and we are able to produce them in Kemi with considerably lower emissions. Finland needs sustainable investment that creates employment, income and a strong belief in the future,” says Ilkka Hämälä, President and CEO of Metsä Group. The Kemi bioproduct mill produces 1.5 million tonnes of softwood and hardwood pulp annually. It uses zero fossil fuels and will be completely waste-free by 2030.

Metsä Board, part of Metsä Group, has again won both the Finnish Circular Economy Award and the Finnish Quality Award in the Excellence Finland assessment. Both the Quality Award and the Circular Economy Award are based on an assessment using the international EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) model. Juha Ylä-Autio, CEO of Excellence Finland, stated in their recent press release that the Quality Award recognised the best organisation in Finland that had achieved verifiable excellence in implementing its strategy. In its reasoning, the jury states that Metsä Board's processes for defining direction, implementing strategy, monitoring and reporting performance are appropriate and operate effectively. The organisation is consistently working to further strengthen the themes of sustainability and circular economy in its corporate culture. Metsä Board has also succeeded in developing effective forms of collaboration within its ecosystem. This is also reflected in the company's performance, business results and competitiveness.

In a world increasingly aware of the need to preserve our natural resources, paper-based packaging offers a renewable, recyclable, and sustainable solution. Through The Responsible Package® initiative, Pratt Industries works with allied companies and associations to provide free, standards-based education materials on this topic to middle school teachers, students, and families. As future decision-makers, the students of today play an important role in preserving our natural resources for future generations. By helping students understand the value of materials that might otherwise be sent to landfill, we as an industry can work to maintain our long-standing tradition of recovering and recycling paper and paper-based packaging at rates well above most of our non-renewable competitors. In 2017, The Responsible Package educational materials were distributed to 355,000 students in more than 2,000 schools across 25 states. All of the educators who responded to a year-end survey expressed interest in repeating their participation in the program and reported students gaining awareness and a positive outlook for paper-based products. Click Read More below for additional information.